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New Feature: Linking to a web version of your campaign

Posted by David Greiner on September 23, 2005

While the majority of web based email environments are slowly improving their HTML rendering skills, some are still pretty far behind. I'm talking to you Hotmail and Gmail. Because of this, it can be a good idea to include a having trouble reading this email, click here link in the header of your email.

If you're sending really long newsletters, this is also a good option. Some of your recipients might prefer the screen real estate afforded by a web browser as opposed to an email client. Up until now, you had to create your own web based version and link to it manually. Well, not any more.

Introducing the <webversion> tag

From today, you can use a simple tag to generate a personalized link to a web based version of your campaign for every recipient. This means that even if they're viewing the web version, we still track how many times they checked it out, what links they clicked on, etc.

In your HTML code, just use the tag <webversion> and </webversion> and we'll do the rest.

For example:

Having trouble reading this email, <webversion>click here</webversion>.

If you're sending a multi-part email and you'd like to include a link to the HTML version in your text version, you can use the [webversion] tag.

For example:

Click the link below to read this email in your browser:
[webversion]

The link will be to our server but will use your personalized subdomain. We'll also be tracking the clicks on all web version links, so if you're recipients aren't using them, you know it's safe to remove them.

9 comments so far

Steve Nelson

wrote on September 23, 2005 06:06 PM

This is a great feature and some nice email redundancy. Now we don't have to worry if a customer cannot see the newsletter, they can click the link and our company can provide robust reporting to the client (nice to know we are still tracking even though its outside their email client). Another top feature, well done Campaign Monitor!

Damien Buckley

wrote on September 26, 2005 03:43 PM

Thats great - saves me putting a second version on my server without the personalisation tags. Great work guys.

Wayne

wrote on September 28, 2005 01:02 AM

Beautiful idea!! I will definetly include it from now on.

Mitchell Amihod

wrote on October 7, 2005 02:59 AM

Hi. I would suggest wrapping that line in a:
<div style="visibility:hidden;">
so if the email client supports CSS, they don't see the message.

Dave Greiner

wrote on October 9, 2005 10:46 AM

Hey Mitchell,

That's a good suggestion, but I think we'll leave that choice up to each designer. That way, they can hide it if they want to, but also have the option of displaying for every recipient, no matter what email environment they're using.

professional web design

wrote on December 8, 2005 07:21 PM

good idea! i'll use it on mine from now on;)

Nathan Pitman

wrote on December 13, 2005 02:48 AM

Fantastic feature. Love it. :)

Jill LeMaire

wrote on February 15, 2006 07:50 AM

Hi. A teammate found your article and began using this code to test. We love the idea! However, we ran into some problems incorporating. What exactly is the purpose of this code? Does it completely eliminate the need for a back-up e-mail page? Regardless of whether or not personalization is used?

Please help!

Dave Greiner

wrote on February 15, 2006 07:07 PM

Hi Jill,

Yep, as we indicated above, this creates a web based version of your campaign for you automatically. This page also maintains personalization, link tracking, etc for each recipient. I just checked the code you submitted and everything looks fine. If you run into any issues, please send them to support(at)campaignmonitor.com

Got anything to add?

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